[James Thurber] was one of the funniest men alive, if you at all tuned in to his doggerel cartoons, with their barking seals and daffily aggressive women swooping on gloomily defenceless males, and his fables, like 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' and 'The Night the Bed Fell', which were angry parables of despair and raging frustration.

Thurber was often like one of his own flopping, loping, terrified animals. His humour, occasionally a little too arch and fey, was redeemed by a cruel pessimism laced with a sort of loony provincialism (his roots in small-town Ohio were deep) which found its sharpest focus either in his sex-war cartoons, or in newly-coined myths that did horribly inventive things to the old archetypes. To say that something is 'Thurberesque' is a code for something quite complex and almost unexplainable, but it certainly has much to do with this nearly blind...